A two
day workshop on Most Significant Changes
(MSC) monitoring will
be held in the Netherlands
on April 11 and 12, 2007. MSC has been used by a number of
organisations for monitoring unexpected and
so-called 'unmeasurable changes'. MSC is often call "monitoring
without
indicators". If you want to know more about MSC monitoring see
the online MSC
Guide at
http://www.mande.co.uk/docs/MSCGuide.htm.
and http://www.mande.co.uk/MSC.htm
. This
course is being organised in collaboration with
the Capacity Development and Institutional Change Programme of
Wageningen
International (www. http://www.cdic.wur.nl/UK/). It
marks the start of a unique series they are organising of hands-on
trainings in 'Innovations
in M&E'. Various
workshops will be held during 2007 and 2008. The flyer with
full details can be found online
at
www.mande.co.uk/docs/WageningenMSCflyer.doc.
A draft programme will be available shortly at http://www.mande.co.uk/docs/WageningenMSCProgramme.doc
The cost of the two days is
€700, excluding 19% VAT. Please inquire
about your VAT status for this course, as rules vary depending on
nationality
and your employer's tax status. The fee includes a copy of the MSC
Guide, additional
course materials, lunches and morning and afternoon coffee and tea
breaks. No
free places or subsidised places are available, but organisations who
are
willing to fund such places would be welcomed and given
recognition. The venue will be in the Wageningen International
Conference Centre (http://www.wicc-wir.nl/).
Accommodation is not included but can be organised in the same location
via
Wageningen International. The maximum number of participants
will be 25, accepted on a first come basis. Please direct all
inquiries to
Maria Soelen
of Wageningen International (
maria.vansoelen@wur.nl). (posted
29/01/07)

Most Significant Change (MSC) Technique.
Two day workshop, Thursday 19th and Friday 20th April
2007 $800 Training provided by Jess
Dart fromClear Horizon,Melbourne, Australia. "MSC is a powerful tool for
monitoring, evaluation and organisational learning. MSC goes beyond merely
capturing and documenting participants'
stories of impact. Each story is accompanied by the storyteller's
interpretation, and offers an opportunity for a diverse range of stakeholders
to enter into a dialogue about project impact. Day one of this workshop
provides an introduction to MSC. Day two of this workshop sees
participants following a number of steps to design an MSC process for their
project or program". Contact person: Lauren
Siegmann at lauren@clearhorizon.com.au (updated 20/12/06)

How did you come to learn about MSC and what
attracted you to the technique?

When have you seen MSC deliver its greatest
impact?

What 3 things would you advise a novice MSC
practitioner to pay attention to?

What is the most common mistake people make with
MSC?

When is it best not to use Most Significant Change
(MSC)?

Building MSC into an M&E Framework for a
program in governance?

MSC standard template to work from for M &
E?

MSC effective when used in evaluating projects
using complimentary development drivers (like ICT)?

MSC theory and its application, particularly in
relation to evaluation of law/justice/policing ?

Perceptions
of 'Significant Change' in School Cultures in South Australia
By Rosie Le Cornu, Judy Peters, Margot Foster, Robyn Barratt and
Jacqueline Stratfold. Published by International Journal of Knowledge,
Culture and Change Management. Volume 6, Issue 5, 2006, pp.161-170.
"Since 1999 over 150 schools in the South Australian Learning to Learn
Initiative have received funding to support educational redesign aimed
at transforming the learning culture and opportunities for both
teachers and their students. For the past three years the Most
Significant Change (MSC) Process has been used by participants to
document and evaluate changes in their schools. MSC was originally
developed by Rick Davies for use in the evaluation of a social
development program in Bangladesh (Davies, 1996). It also goes under
several other names such as ‘the Evolutionary Approach to
Organisational Learning’, ‘the Narrative
Approach’
and also ‘the Story Approach’ (Dart, Drysdale, Cole
&
Saddington, 2000). In South Australia the process involved participants
writing stories about what they perceived to be significant change as a
result of involvement in the project, and then engaging in a process of
discussion and selection to identify those stories that were considered
to be most illustrative of significant change. This paper reports on
the use of the process as a tool for evaluating educational change and
presents findings from an analysis which was conducted on the stories
to reveal participants’ perceptions of what constitutes
significant change in school cultures, practice and outcomes for
teachers and students." (posted 13/12/06)

Praxis
Paper No. 12 Learning
from Capacity Building Practice: Adapting the ‘Most
Significant Change’ (MSC) Approach to Evaluate
Capacity Building Provisionby CABUNGO in
Malawi By Rebecca Wrigley December
2006
"This paper provides a reflection on a pilot experience of using the
‘Most Significant Change’ (MSC) methodology to
evaluate the capacity
building services of CABUNGO, a local capacity building support
provider in Malawi. MSC is a story-based, qualitative and participatory
approach to monitoring and evaluation (M&E). INTRAC and CABUNGO
worked collaboratively to adapt and implement the MSC approach to
capture
the complex and often intangible change resulting from capacity
building, as well as to enhance CABUNGO’s learning and
performance.
Overall, it is felt that MSC did provide an effective approach to
evaluating capacity.... Participants in the evaluation process felt
that using a story-based approach was very useful in helping CABUNGO to
understand the impact that it is having on the organisational capacity
of its clients and how its services could be improved. The key
advantages of using MSC were its ability to capture and consolidate the
different perspectives of stakeholders, to aid understanding and
conceptualisation of complex change, and to enhance organisational
learning. The potential constraints of using MSC as an approach to
evaluating capacity building lay in meeting the needs of externally
driven evaluation processes and dealing with subjectivity and bias".
(12/12/06)

Participatory video for
monitoring and evaluation Chris
Lunch Insight Oxford
UK clunch@insightshare.orgCapacity.org, Issue 29, September
2006
"Participatory video lends itself well to project monitoring and
evaluation. Chris Lunch, director of Insight, describes how communities
are using video to capture and interpret stories of significant change.
See the section on "Improving participatory video as a tool for
M&E" "Our initial experiences with participatory video led us
to
two important questions. How could we formalise its obvious potential
as an M&E tool and develop a more systematic approach? How
could we
add a quantifiable element in the otherwise very qualitative material
that was being generated? Rick Davies’ ‘most
significant
change’ (MSC) technique provided a way forward on both these
questions....". (12/12/06)

Evaluation:
LandLearn’s most significant change. Lydia
Fehring, Jenny Pettenon, Ann Fagan, Kathryn Goyen, Jessica Connoron
the website of the Australiasia Pacific Extension Network. Abstract.
"LandLearn is an education program provided by the Victorian Department
of Primary Industries (DPI) aimed at assisting teachers to integrate
sustainable agriculture and natural resource management into the
curriculum to encourage student learnings around those themes. To
coincide with the end of the previous five years of funding, LandLearn
engaged an external evaluation consultancy to undertake a formative
evaluation of the program.The aim of the evaluation was to plan the
next phase of LandLearn, guide and inform decision making and to look
for the intermediate indicators of success. That is, we wanted to know
that we were contributing to long-term behaviour change by measuring
the extent that our audience was using and valuing LandLearn beyond our
initial contact. An unexpected outcome of the evaluation was using the
Most Significant Change (MSC) technique as a method of evaluating the
program. Through the use of MSC, LandLearn was able to successfully
collect qualitative data on the long-term impact of the LandLearn
program. This presentation will demonstrate the value of the MSC
technique and the way LandLearn has used project evaluation and
learning for continual improvement. Three key learnings: (1) Using the
Most Significant Change technique was a particularly powerful method
where traditionally there are challenges to measure and demonstrate
short-term impact. MSC also engages key stakeholders, investors and
partners in a process that is fun, enjoyable, interesting and a
learning opportunity for them. (2) Undertaking the evaluation allowed
staff to look critically at how we do business – it confirmed
the
way that we do things, supported our assumptions and provided us
clarity in planning and defining our next steps; and (3) The MSC
technique has considerable value in evaluating the long term practice
change of programs, especially when working with the intermediate users
(teachers)." 913/12/06)

(From
the MSC
Users Guide, p8) "The most significant change (MSC) technique
is a form of participatory monitoring and evaluation. It is
participatory because many project stakeholders are involved both in
deciding the sorts of change to be recorded and in analysing the data.
It is a form of monitoring because it occurs throughout the program
cycle and provides information to help people manage the program. It
contributes to evaluation because it provides data on impact and
outcomes that can be used to help assess the performance of the program
as a whole."

"Essentially, the process involves the collection of significant change
(SC) stories emanating from the field level, and the systematic
selection of the most significant of these stories by panels of
designated stakeholders or staff. The designated staff and stakeholders
are initially involved by ‘searching’ for project
impact.
Once changes have been captured, various people sit down together, read
the stories aloud and have regular and often in-depth discussions about
the value of these reported changes. When the technique is implemented
successfully, whole teams of people begin to focus their attention on
program impact".

(From the
MSC email list webpage) "Most
Significant Changes monitoring is different from common monitoring
practice in at least four respects: (a) The focus is on the unexpected,
(b) Information about those events is documented using text rather than
numbers, (c) Analysis of that information is through the use of
explicit value judgements, (d) Aggregation of information and analysis
takes place through a structured social process."